Unite to Christ's Suffering

Holy Week helps Catholics to focus on the meaning of suffering.  We must take up our crosses as Christ did.


One purpose for the Church’s yearly re-presentation of the events of our salvation is to make it easier for us to take up our crosses, big and little, offering them up in love and thanksgiving to Our Savior who out of love for us endured a cross beyond our comprehension. As Catholics, we know that God’s divine condescension permits us a share in his redeeming action, “filling up what is lacking,” as St. Paul daringly put it to the Colossians, in the sufferings of Christ.

We do this when we embrace our daily challenges and opportunities to help others, from the spiritual to the mundane. For instance, we can offer our Communion with a special intention for sinners or the deceased. We can also offer up work in the office or at home for sinners and the souls in purgatory; we can practice self-denial in food and drink and entertainment and engage in corporal or spiritual works of mercy (you can read about them in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, which no doubt is on the table beside you as you read this).

We can pray the Holy Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet, picket or pray before an abortion clinic, make pilgrimages to holy places with family and friends. We can read books on the Passion by saints, mystics, and sound spiritual authors (Pope Emeritus Benedict’s concluding volume on Jesus offers great insights).

And of course there is the Way of the Cross itself, available with commentary in dozens of worthwhile versions, including those of (soon-to-be) St. John Paul and St. Josemaria Escriva. The intercessory value of such offerings to God, even the smallest, can be immeasurable, since that value comes from Christ.

In any event, none of us will escape life without suffering. Whatever form it takes – bodily pain, mental illness, addiction, poverty, loneliness, bereavement, persecution. It is in experiencing this suffering that we truly are able to identify to some extent with HIS Suffering, which was both incalculably worse (because he bore the sum total of human sin and suffering) and completely unmerited.

It is then, in our own affliction, that we grasp something of how he – true God and true Man – suffered for each one of us.

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